Rejuvenated by fiddleheads and ice cream cones

With one too many meals consumed hurriedly in front of a computer for the last two weeks, this weekend we issued a corrective.

Friday night to Lula, my favorite restaurant in all the land, where we dined on an appetizer of pan seared sea scallops with fiddlehead ferns, pinenuts, sorrel and mandarin; (my entree) stinging nettle, farro, green and white asparagus, young garlic, hazelnuts, and poached farm egg 'noisette'; (J's) lake superior whitefish with morel mushrooms, dandelion greens, walnuts and applewood bacon. I had a taste of the whitefish which I usually love but all I tasted was bacon, which I haven't eaten in years and now I realize I have not missed at all. Dessert was a jasmine rice pudding with mandarine champagne broth and lavender, a nice sweet finish to a meal that was wholly satisfying. We had a white wine with this meal that was good, but not memorable.

Saturday morning I woke up at 6 and bicycled to the Green City Market in Lincoln Park. The weather was pristine and I walked about as the vendors arrived and set up, beating the post-8 a.m. crowd and finding a lot of opportunity to talk with the growers. Fresh strawberries and rhubarb were in abundance and I tried to imagine some time this week to bake with them, but 4 deadlines in the next 7 days say nein. I still brought a few stalks of rhubarb for J, since he recalls it growing in abundance in his yard growing up and ate it raw with a little sugar. But, I wonder, isn't this a plant with a toxicity caveat? Without having much of a cooking plan, I did pack a bag full of things that could be quickly stir-fried in the next few evenings: purple asparagus (growers were saying this could be asparagus's last week), wild watercress, some greens called Spignorello which I'd never heard of before, fresh mint, flat-leaf parsley, blush-red turnips. was also tempted by the armloads of young garlic and spring onions and their three foot long tender greens, but they looked like they might be around next time, and the nano-greens (arugula sprouts, sunflower sprouts, etc.). A fresh baguette, a jar of apple butter, a bouquet of peonies and a tomato, cheese and herb crepe made and eaten on the spot rounded out my morning's entertainment.

Bicycling home wasn't too difficult, but getting back baskets is clearly in order if my grocery shopping is to exceed one shoulderbag-full.

A last minute dinner with an old friend inspired me to attempt a re-creation of Lula's stinging nettle and farro with watercress and wild rice instead. For young garlic, old garlic; for hazelnuts, pinenuts; for green asparagus, purple asparagus, etc. It came together in a similar presentation, but ultimately the garlic broth that tied it all together was lacking a little punch, or salt, or maybe it was miso it needed. In any case, we all felt quite energized afterwards we took a long(ish) walk to Margie's (the wait at 10 pm. to eat dessert at Hot Chocolate was 2 hours! That's a Brooklyn wait, so screw that) for an ice-cream cone to go (crowds were waiting outside for one of the few booths to open up, definitely a place to return to for the full-on banana split in the clam-shell bowl. The atmosphere made me mourn something I hadn't realized had been so completely lost from my youth when those old joints from the 1920's were still in service and hardly exceptional.)

One more note on a redemptive 24 hours of food and relaxation: two excellent wine recommendations from the outpost down the street where the owner is incrementally enlarging my wine education and has never steered us wrong in the dozen bottles we've drunk in the short time his store has been open. La Cappuccina 2005 Soave proved to be a refreshing glass by itself, and paired well with the white bean pate that preceded last night's dinner and with the garlic-infused and bitter-astringent greens and nuttiness of my watercress and wild rice experiment. Later, the perfectly proportioned red J picked out was an easy drinker, excelling in all the characters he and I like in a red: not too full-bodied, but dry with a bit of earthiness and spice. That one's the Abad Dom Bueno Roble.

Years ago, three or four weeks into a backpacking trip through Europe I got really homesick when we stopped in a chips shop in London and saw this familiar poster. Somehow trying to explain to others that a tug-boat squirting mustard on a mile-long wiener made me misty-eyed only draws perplexing stares.

Winging It Ciopinno

Thawed a package of TJ’s frozen seafood medley in the fridge overnight. Brought about 5 cups of water and 2 bay leaves to a boil and steamed the medley of crab legs, scallops, lobster and shrimp for about 10 minutes. Peeled and shelled all the seafood once it had cooled (this was the most time-consuming and laborious part) and then put that in a container back in the fridge.

Kept the pot of water that I used to steam the seafood and added shells to it, about a cup of fresh parsley (chopped), 3 chopped scallions, ½ a chopped onion, a large bunch of dried thyme, 3 ribs of celery, 2 chopped carrots and some salt and pepper. I added some more water to all of this so that my pot was about 2/3 full (maybe another 5 cups). I don’t know if I’m going to need this much broth for my final ciopinno, but I can always freeze the rest I suppose.

Let that simmer for an hour or so.

I’ve never made a stock derived from animals before. And while I seldom cook fish or seafood at home, and handling it does always make me question the exceptional status I’ve given this category of non-vegetable matter in my otherwise vegetarian diet, it is satisfying to make full use of the creatures, that nothing has been wasted. I’m not sure if I’m more comfortable eating these animals because of nostalgic childhood connections to them.. ripping apart boiled lobsters my grandmother would bring from Boston on her Christmas visits to us. The frequency of fish my mom cooked derived from family traditions shaped by living near the Adriatic. The 7 fish Christmas dinner.

Once I had the stock and strained it, I sautéed 3 cloves of garlic and one small diced onion in some olive oil at the bottom of my heavy stock pot. Once that was translucent, I added all the stock I made (a little overly ambitious perhaps). Then I chopped up the pound of snapper I had and threw that in there with a can of diced tomatoes that were already seasoned Italian, a cup of red wine, a can of anchovies, ½ c of chopped parsley, 1 T of tomato paste, and a 28 oz. can of whole tomatoes that I chopped up. This all cooked together for about 10 minutes and pretty soon the snapper was looking white and opaque and done. I threw in the seafood I had steamed earlier to warm through with the rest of the stew for a final couple of minutes and then it was ready to be eaten!

Verdict: tasty.

Next time: more fish and less stock in the final stew, slightly more garlic and wine, maybe some cayenne pepper.

OK, I just spent too long pouring over a website that sells nothing but lunchboxes. For starters, I skipped past all the nylon sacks and mod bentos and went straight for the metal category. Warning sign number one. Scrolling through cartoon characters and logos old and new, I stopped for a moment of purely aesthetic appreciation for the red and brown “I’m a Pepper” and the beige, green and orange Orange Crush boxes, thinking of J’s story of the damage these pre-OSHA time bombs could wreck: see whirling dervish with slippery grip meets sister’s brow. As if all of this wasn’t already woefully retro, or “vintage” as J noticed his record collection handily classed in a recent browse through a used record store, the nostalgia alarms became impossible to ignore when I found myself nearly purchasing a Strawberry Shortcake lunchbox exactly like the one I carried to Trinity Lutheran School on Old German Church Road in 1984. Understand, Strawberry was the talisman of my youth. Everything I wore and surrounded myself with, for a time, had to be red, the color of her berry charisma. My devotion to her hung on for years but ended before her move to Saturday morning cartoons. For me, she was a character only, a visual cue for that thing the elders refer to as Imagination. I spent hours everyday speculating on the doings of Raspberry Tart and Plum Pudding and Strawberry’s cat Custard in their parallel universe that carried on simultaneous to my daily experience. At school I would wonder, what are they doing right now? Other times my existential queries probed deeper: What do their bathrooms look like? What do they eat for breakfast? Two things are apparent to me now, with the distance of 24 years: I was never a plot-driven kind of gal (the conflict and other trappings of typical story patterning always bothered me, whether it was in books, movies or Saturday morning cartoons, it always seemed superficial), the first sign of the writer who would later find herself via Gertrude Stein and Virginia Woolf; and, most obviously, the foodcentrism of all these imaginings.

Much is made of early food memories— that anyone of discriminating taste as an adult surely had a sensually epic childhood of meals one might still prepare for oneself and the transport those meals offer to a place of comfort and simplicity. And this creates an interesting question I may return to, but for now I’m struck by the power of non-edible food memories like my Shortcake years. The fruity-scented mops of hair, the iconic berry as both architecture and décor. In the days before merchandising filled in every imaginative aspect of a childhood character’s universe, a berry was not only a berry but a girl, a house, an ethic of gentle kindness, a sound that possessed semantic-bending powers, i.e. “Have a berry good day.” Paralleling the years in which literacy is being formed, is it not possible that a slippery sequitur like this is a very healthy thing? That –and her antioxidant profile— has renewed my appreciation for this curly redhead in a way simple nostalgia could never explain. Hell, maybe I’ll get the lunchbox after all.